Principles of Nostalgia

on the principles of nostalgia
embossing/embroidery and photographic works by Katie Bruce

“on the principles of nostalgia is essentially an attempt to summarize the personal memories attached to place, while acknowledging the inherent failures of such an undertaking. While the collection of works on display are from varying series, they are all rooted in places and spaces that I have lived and created art in during my tenure in Lethbridge. The embossing/embroidery works started as a way to symbolically mend places and bonds between people; they became a way to commemorate the communal places I found myself a part of and living in. These prints are lifted from found surface “plates” by a hand-embossing technique, and are then transformed through hand-embroidering the raised portion of the impressions. The locations range from tables, to apartment building landings, to the Banff Centre print shop.

The rest of the exhibition is comprised of two photographic series, which look to examine the process of extending time. here/there attempts to comprehend what happens in the moments between places, with each photograph representing the distance of a thought. Authentic and ephemeral, the colours are true to the film they have been enlarged from. The two images completing median: Picton are the result of every photograph taken during a month long print making residency in Prince Edward County, Ontario. Their counter image, bonfire, is created in the same manner, using images from a single, discreet event in time. Digitally layering each image, valued to the same opacity, creates an average of the experience caught with my camera and visually, a dense, silvery plane.

here/there and median are reactions to the idea of the decisive moment, and the process by which that moment can be altered whilst remaining authentic. All three series function as a sort of anti-photography; each piece is genuine to its original circumstances, but have been handled in such a way to challenge the audience in drawing conclusions about their origins.”